


To Be There in Time

by Zaniida



Series: Creepyfest AUs [4]
Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Acceptance, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Horror, Canon Disabled Character, Cost/Benefit Analysis, Denise's Delight, Gen, Grief, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Life Crisis, October Content, Tearjerker, Time Manipulation, pros and cons, random weirdness - Freeform, resignation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-14
Updated: 2018-08-21
Packaged: 2019-01-17 06:16:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 16,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12359295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zaniida/pseuds/Zaniida
Summary: InOne Bargain Harold Could Not Agree to (and Five He Could), I offer six variations on what Elias might have asked Harold for, instead of just a chess partner.  This series is theHalloween AUvariant.  It's not just Elias (though some of it will be): It's different situations where Harold has to make a hard decision, and the realistic setting has been tossed out the window in favor of all manner of spooky, creepy, crazy, or magic-related setups.If you feel like joining in on the October funtimes, feel free to write a Related Work where any horror-genre setup (or similar) forces Harold to choose the lesser of two or more evils, or sacrifice himself, in some fashion, for the greater good.





	1. Deep Magicks

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tipsylex](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tipsylex/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Our veins are busy but my heart's in atrophy](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3920329) by [illuminatedcities](https://archiveofourown.org/users/illuminatedcities/pseuds/illuminatedcities). 
  * Inspired by [Unconditional Surrender](https://archiveofourown.org/works/746034) by [astolat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/astolat/pseuds/astolat). 



> Unlike _Bespoke_ , I'm not trying for a creepyfest in this fic. However, expect typical Halloween monsters to show up in various chapters. Each chapter is its own AU… except there's problem with that.
> 
> Okay, the split-chapter thing was driving me nuts, so this is now a series instead of a single fic with crazy chapters. It's still a 5+1 fic in spirit. As with the non-AU fic, the first chapter is Chapter Zero and is the bargain Harold cannot accept; Chapters One through Five are the bargains he's willing to accept, despite the cost.
> 
> So once we get this refusal chapter out of the way, everything else is horrible things that Harold has to go through.
> 
> Well… the first chapter is a different kind of horrible thing that Harold goes through… and it could be said that he accepts a bargain to do so… nevertheless! he refuses at the end. So there. Taxonomy!
> 
> (Also, I think I may have written the world's first anti-Fix Fic. Probably not. Probably people have written this kind of thing before me; fandom is a big place. But I haven't run across a fic that works like this fic does, so… maybe?)
> 
> P.S. **Tipsylex** , I've been thinking of you a lot while writing this first chapter! Hope you enjoy it ^_^

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Desperate to restore his friend to life, Harold seeks out a spell -- but he may not be prepared for the fallout.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been rather distracted while trying to get this and several other things done in something like a timely manner. My tags may not cover everything they should. Since Halloween content relies even more heavily on suspense and surprise, I'm trying to keep most of the spoiler-y tags in the end notes for each chapter. If you think I've missed a tag, or can think of one I really should add, please let me know!

As Harold limped through the abandoned subway tunnels, past the demolished remains of their recent safe haven, the scar tissue in his stomach began to twinge.

It was around here somewhere -- the source of the ambient magic -- and he would never have had a chance of finding it were it not for the things he’d seen four years ago, as Root’s prisoner. Even without powers like hers, he knew what to look for, and how to fight the increasingly painful desire to turn aside, to throw his attention elsewhere.

The almost invisible marks on the bricks were easily smudged away, allowing him to see the other marks further down the old service tunnel -- marks that would do more than try to distract him. He approached slowly, as close as he dared, and paused.

For days, he’d been struggling with the morality of this choice, knowing what it might cost him -- and not just him. But there was no other way. John had given his life for the world, leaving a hole inside Harold that nothing else could fill. And if Harold had to bargain away his soul itself, he was going to get John back -- or give his life for the effort.

“ _Root_ ,” he whispered, finally, knowing that her spy wards would carry the word to her, no matter how quiet. It was only a question of if she’d care to respond.

 

When he’d seen Root get shot by Samaritan’s agents, Harold had expected her to die -- or, perhaps, be taken prisoner, even though Samaritan didn’t seem to be aware of her powers. Instead, while the agents were focused on him, she’d faked her own death and retreated to her hidden lair. In the final battle, still wounded, she’d used her spells to reduce the number of operatives they’d had to deal with, and to confuse their shots by making John appear in multiple locations. Not enough to save John, in the end, but enough to buy them time, to make sure that the virus got uploaded -- their final stand had succeeded only because she’d taken her place at John’s side, astrally, if not physically.

Having seen her projected form comforting a dying John right up to the second before impact, Harold knew that she’d suffered that day: The explosion couldn’t harm her, but, in her astral form, she was directly affected by the emotional world of the other beings around her, and would have been immersed in John’s sorrow and fear and pain, up to the very last second of his life.

Since that day, she’d been in hiding; Harold wasn’t entirely sure that she’d be pleased to see him. He’d ignored too much of her advice, her warnings, and now, in the aftermath, he could admit that the war could have gone much better had he been less stubborn at the time. The list of wrongs between them had grown heavy, and the fact that she’d made the first move -- that she had, in fact, attempted to kill him on more than one occasion -- didn’t excuse his behavior toward _her_. Using wards to seal her magic and trap her in the middle of the city she tried to avoid, whose electronic chatter assaulted her enhanced senses like (she had once confided to him) a constant buzzing just shy of painful, which made it difficult for her to even sleep… at the time, he hadn’t understood just what it was doing to her, but that didn’t matter, it was no excuse: He had had _no right_ to treat her that way.

And then, while she was a captive audience, persuading her to join a war that she’d never wanted to be a part of, so that by the time she’d gotten out of physical restraints and had her powers restored to her, the _moral_ restraints had kept her in the battle until the very final note.

True, without those fetters, she would never have met Shaw… never have been so captivated by a woman whose emotions couldn’t be sensed on the astral plane, whose affinity to magical forces was so low that Root couldn’t even persuade her body to heal faster after getting shot. But then, she wouldn’t have felt the pain and desperation of losing Shaw for all those months, either -- that same low affinity making it impossible to track her passage or locate her prison through scrying, or even determine for certain whether or not she was alive. And now, with the team split up, no one knew where Shaw was keeping herself; all the Machine would reveal was that she was faithfully working cases.

So it was possible that Root had retreated into her hideaway not just to recover, physically and emotionally, from those final days, or to block out the buzz in the airwaves, but to avoid them _all_ \-- whether for a while or for good. Perhaps to wait until Shaw was willing to join them again, or perhaps to try to forget their relationship, to drown the memories until she was free to return to the backwoods heritage she’d temporarily left behind while trying to capture Harold in the first place.

And if the need hadn’t been urgent, Harold would have left her to it -- he’d intruded enough into her life by now, and had no right to demand of her anything further. But John’s loss was eating away at him, making it impossible to focus on anything else, and he knew it would never get better until he dealt with it… no matter what the cost.

 

For long, anxious minutes he stood there, looking for some sign that she’d heard him, that she was either inviting him in or driving him away -- but there was nothing. Just the steady wards and the silent tunnel and his own tumultuous thoughts.

Then, further down the tunnel, the wall started to wobble, then partially disappeared -- revealing a large hole in the masonry. Harold let out the breath that he hadn’t realized he was holding. Glancing at the still-active wards, he hobbled his way along the path, then ducked through the hole into a small, dimly lit cave--

…with nothing in it. He turned around to see the entrance shimmer back behind him, and when he had turned back he found a long, natural-seeming tunnel stretching out before him, barely tall enough for him to walk without stooping; his hair brushed the ceiling with every hurried step.

A few minutes later, he emerged into a much larger cave, this one more like a geodesic dome than any natural occurrence. It was richly decorated, too -- although he couldn’t tell if the decorations were real or illusory. Possibly the entire room was illusory, but he didn’t have time to be doubting his own senses, as he had when Root had pulled him into her world the first time.

She was standing there near the entrance, a tender smile on her face. Apparently glad to see him -- but, of course, when it came to Root, he couldn’t trust appearances. Over the years, they’d become something like friends, and she’d saved his life repeatedly… yet he could never forget what she had been, never be certain that she’d left that part of herself behind for good. After she’d tricked the team and taken him prisoner, John had tracked him down, barely in time to rescue him before her ritual would have torn his soul from his body, merged the information in his head with hers and fed her powers with the dying light of his mortality.

Yet today, he was here to offer anything -- anything she demanded, anything at all, even if it meant giving her his very soul -- _if it could return John to life_.

“Well, Harry… we did it after all. We saved the world.”

“ _John_ saved the world,” Harold retorted before he could think about it.

“I know. I was there.”

“Then you know why I’m _here_.”

Her eyes grew sad. “Yes, Harry. I know.”

When she’d first called him by a nickname, instead of his actual name, it had annoyed him to no end; he’d never appreciated nicknames. Later, coming to understand why a magic-user would avoid using true names, he’d considered it a courtesy, even grown to appreciate it. It was also why she answered to _Root_ , and not to the name that she’d been born to -- that had taken him a little more time to adjust to, given his penchant for addressing people politely. But true names held power, and those immersed in the occult avoided them.

Harold took in a deep breath. “Can you do it? I don’t care what you have to do, what it costs. Whatever needs to change -- whatever I have to sacrifice -- I just… I want him back.”

Root hummed as she looked him over. “You ask of deep magicks. Undoing death is no easy feat.”

“But it _can_ be done, can’t it?”

“Perhaps.” She waved her hand, and a silver urn floated over to her, its swirling designs glowing deep blue; she curled one arm around it.

“Is there anything I need to do -- to get for you? I thought of bringing part of John’s b-body, but…” He had to push away the thought of what had happened to that body; the tears were already starting to prick at the corners of his eyes.

“For this,” Root said, taking a handful of something out of the urn, “we shall not need much from John.” Walking slowly, she let it slide through her soft fist -- glittering silver sand, drawing a line across the floor. “But more from _you_.”

“I’m prepared. Tell me what I must do.”

“Your true name, Harry. Speak it in this room.” She made a sharp turn, continuing the pattern with her sand.

Harold swallowed. “…Harold Jacob Lee Wright.”

“And do you know the true name of the one whose fate you wish to change?” Another point drawn.

“I… I’m not certain. My research points to _John Hector Talos_. But I never got the chance to confirm--”

But he suddenly sucked in air, staring at the center of the room, where an image was forming: John, at the height of his happiness with Jessica, physically strong and emotionally wide open. One of the last times he had been allowed to bear his true name.

“It seems your research was correct. That makes this easier,” Root said, the seven-pointed star continuing to take shape across the floor.

The image faded, almost as if it had been sucked into the sand.

“Can you save him?” Harold asked again, barely holding back a sob. The loss of the image struck hard, like losing John all over again.

“I cannot simply draw him back from the destiny he has gone to meet,” Root said calmly. “However, there are deep magicks that deal with time, and _those_ are within my power in this place. They do require sacrifice.” She finished up the final point of the star, and stepped back carefully. “Your life, Harold Jacob Lee Wright, turns on seven decisions, and these points represent those decisions, the most important choices in your journey from birth to death. These seven turning points, I can affect, allowing you to spin the story in a different direction. But you may not like the way it turns!”

“Just tell me what I have to do.”

“Know, then, two things: This spell must never happen twice. And, once I have begun the ritual, it will not stop until the very last decision has been accounted for. If you would have me do this, take your place in the middle of this star, but do not disturb the sand.”

Careful of his steps, yet without the slightest hesitation, Harold limped into the middle, and faced toward Root. She was standing between two spikes, and he could almost feel the magic emanating from her slender body.

“We seek to open the past,” Root said, and her intonation had grown low, thrumming with the power of her words. “We seek awareness of the pivots in the life of Harold Jacob Lee Wright, and their effect on John Hector Talos. Loose the chains that bind these pasts together, and allow Harold to choose anew whether each point was worth the toll.”

She held out her left hand, and the spike beneath it began to glow. “I see the first turning point in your life,” she intoned. “You were only seventeen. You felt disillusioned by the actions of those in power, pinned down by the realities of your father’s illness, hampered by the limitations of your small-town life. Striking out against arbitrary constraints felt like the only victory you could claim at the time, even if it meant opening yourself up to possible consequences. Do you see it, Harold Wright? You chose to worm your way in where they wanted to keep people like you out.”

The room around him faded; he was sitting at a table, staring at the clunky monitor of a homemade computer, and a wave of nostalgia hit him as he saw the green letters on the tiny screen:

ARPANET

PROPERTY OF THE

UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT

CONTINUE? [Y] or [N]

“ _If they don’t wanna let people inside, they oughta build it better_ ,” he heard himself say.

“Harold?” Root’s voice called him back to himself, but he still saw the room, his fingers hovering over the keyboard. “What does this moment mean to you?”

“It was the culmination of everything I’d been trying to do,” he said, his voice holding just the edge of that teenage squeak. “I hacked into ARPANET… released the internet to the public at large. I changed the world.”

“No,” said Root’s voice, gently. “You changed _yourself_. The internet happens regardless -- a few years later, delaying a few inventions, but a technology like that could never have stayed hidden. But your choice, here in this room, it led to a string of events that separated you from family, from everything you’d ever known -- it put you on the run. In the absence of money or support, it forced you to learn new skills just to survive, and then again to surpass survival and take for yourself the future you wanted.”

Harold looked down at the huge black keys, and swallowed.

“Without that decision, and all the harm it did to your early years, you will still get into MIT -- legitimately, instead of through forged transcripts -- but you’ll never become capable of making anything so sophisticated as the Machine. Nor will you internalize the habits of privacy and secrecy that enabled you to evade the government, and then Samaritan, for so long.”

“But if I never make the Machine, and never hack ARPANET, I wouldn’t _need_ to hide.”

“True. If you change this moment, you will never do anything valuable enough to make those in power take notice.”

“If the internet happens regardless… will the Machine happen too? Made by someone else, not by me?”

“From this point, I cannot see that far. I see only those changes that affect you, and those closely connected to you; souls, not technology, no matter how sophisticated. But from what I know of the Machine… others would have tried it, and there are many who would be brilliant enough to pull it off. But not with the care you used. They wouldn’t work so hard to make an ASI that could co-exist with human beings. They wouldn’t try so hard to make it _care_.”

After everything they’d been through, Harold _had_ come to think of the Machine as something like a daughter. It hurt to think of her disappearing, never having been created, never learning to play chess or to understand humans the way he had carefully taught her.

Still, unlike Root, he had never placed her on a pedestal. So in the choice between the Machine and John, there was no real competition: Only one of them had a soul.

“Even if it never learns to care about humans the way the Machine did, it will still protect humanity, won’t it? Still take care of the Relevant list, even if it doesn’t learn to point out the Irrelevants.”

“Isn’t that what we just fought a war over, Harold? An ASI that terrorized the world because it never learned to care about humanity? About free will?”

“I-- I-- I can’t care about that now,” he blurted, breath coming faster. “Tell me about John. If I don’t press this button, what happens to _John_?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My time estimates for last month and this month turned out to be nonsense. I had rather meant to get all of _Bargains_ posted in September, but that fell through. This fic draws from that fic, and there are some direct parallels in the chapters (particularly in Chapter Four of both). So the extra-chapter format is extra annoying to me right now. Still, as long as I get the original (non-October-y) chapters posted before the October chapters that draw from those ideas, it should be fine, right?
> 
> …I'll just keep deluding myself.
> 
>  **Bargains:** https://archiveofourown.org/works/12134205


	2. Trade-Offs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The first vision concludes, and the second begins: the decision of whether or not to make the Machine to begin with.
> 
> And after that, the third: whether to help the Irrelevants.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings in end note. Mostly it's canon details, including a suicide.

“Tell me about John. If I don’t press this button, what happens to _John_?”

“You will never meet John Talos. You’ll never affect his life in any way.”

“He’ll never get caught up in my mission… or sidetracked by the trip to Ordos. He gets to go home, to be with Jessica.” Harold swallowed. “He gets to _live_.”

“He will go home to Jessica, true; he'll save her life, and enjoy a short time with her. And then she’ll leave him, just as he feared, because she won’t be able to stand the darkness she sees in him. The darkness that you could have raised him from. She will leave, and he will kill himself -- believing that no one could ever accept him after what he’s done.”

Before Harold was suddenly a tombstone, light gray; he was no longer in his dining room. The words cut into the stone, sharp and bright: JOHN TALOS. Underneath, his service record, but nothing personal, nothing memorable. One headstone among thousands.

Harold fell to his knees in the sodden grass, his eyes filling with tears. John deserved so much more than a short life and a grave no one would ever visit.

Pushing up his glasses, he wiped furiously at his eyes, and found himself once again sitting in front of the computer, the green letters flickering at him.

He stabbed the Y key, and the world faded around him; he was back in the center of the circle, tears trickling down his cheeks, the glow of the first spike fading away as the silver dust turned black.

One down. Six more choices to make.

“These turning points,” Root intoned, “are not spread evenly across your life. It seems that, for all you accomplished to gain wealth and skills throughout your years, most of your choices were set in stone from the moment you pressed that button. The next point at which your life might have gone in a different direction didn’t happen until 2001 -- when a friend told you about the towers coming down.”

To his right, the next point of the star lit up, and he swallowed heavily as he waited for the vision to start. But as the room around him faded, he found himself in a gray bubble, staring at a television screen; from beside him came words, barely discernible.

“ _If we don’t change the world, someone else will._ ”

God, that was-- Nathan, sitting beside him, a glass of scotch in his hand. But he was fuzzy and indistinct, hard to make out -- and when Harold tried to grasp him by the shoulder, his hand passed right through, as though Nathan were a ghost.

Which, after all, was not too far from the truth, but Harold tried not to think about his friend in that way.

“Yes,” said Root, “your life is bound up with this man as well. I can almost see him… can you speak his true name?”

“Na-- Nathaniel Werner Ingram.”

The vision solidified, and Harold could smell the scotch, taste it in his mouth. Nathan reeked of it. In that room again, sitting beside his friend, Harold numbly watched the horrific footage of the plane crashes, the explosions, the people jumping to their deaths to escape the fire and smoke above.

Glancing at his friend, he realized that he hadn’t even considered the possibility of undoing _Nathan_ ’s death. Where John had accepted the likelihood of his death since the day they’d met, Nathan had never signed up for that -- and had only died because of Harold’s stubborn insistence on ignoring those in need, claiming it was for the greater good.

Nathan had cared more than Harold did, and died for it, passing the burden of caring on to Harold, a trait he should have borne all along.

“If John is your primary concern,” came Root’s voice, “you should know that his fate will be the same, here. His fate, and yours, hinge on whether you decide to create the Machine or not. If you do not take that path, you two will never meet, and he will kill himself, just like before.”

Unable to take his gaze off Nathan, Harold swallowed. Could he trade John’s life for Nathan’s?

“If I do not make the Machine -- does Nathan live?” he asked, barely able to voice the words. Nathan didn’t react.

“Nathaniel will live. Have a string of marriages, divorces. A few more children. Over time, he will get disheartened with the world, and try to create inventions to make it better, safer -- but his technical skill will never be comparable to yours, Harold. And if you refuse to create an AI, you will ignore the rest of his ideas as well. They will never get anywhere. You’ll grow apart; you won’t even attend his funeral.”

Surely Nathan’s life was worth more than their friendship. And yet… “Will he be happy, though? Even if his inventions don’t take off, will he--”

“Nathaniel Ingram will come to the end of his life in disillusionment and pain. There will be bright points, but they won’t make up for the darkness he sees in the world. With your help, he might have been able to do something about that darkness -- without it, he never will.”

“Then if I don’t create the Machine… Nathan’s life will be longer but worse, and John will still die… and the Irrelevants…”

“Yes.”

“I must, then. I have to create it. There’s no real choice.”

The spike beside him went black, and the vision was gone.

“There was,” Root said, “but now, there is not. And now, no matter what you choose, you will always meet John -- but not necessarily to his benefit.”

Letting out a shaky breath, Harold nodded soberly. “The… the next turning point, then.” He licked his lips. “It’s when Nathan asked me about the Irrelevants. When I denied responsibility.”

“Yes… but not the first chance you had to take responsibility. That moment is fixed: Individual lives never mattered to you as much as society at large. Condemning trees so that the forest may live… it seemed logical to you, obvious.”

“…Until I had to deal with the consequences of that viewpoint. Personally.”

“But you had a chance to avert that disaster. Nathaniel offered you a better choice, a way out, and, for a moment, you considered it. So the true turning point” -- and he could just _feel_ the light, just outside his peripheral vision, yet shining brightly in his mind’s eye -- “is here.”

And then he was in the library, anger and fear warring within him, as he stared at Nathan, at the laptop screen between them.

“ _This threatens everything that we-- everything that I have built_ ,” he heard himself say, as if an echo in the air, not coming from his own throat. And then, “ _I would tell her -- or whoever it was -- that I was sorry, but that the greater good was at stake._ ”

A chill ran through him.

“ _I’m sorry, Nathan. Truly. …We can’t save all of them._ ”

The words had echoed in his head for months after the explosion -- in the empty library, in hospital beds after surgery, in his own apartment when the painkiller fog wasn’t enough to keep the memories at bay. And time after time after time as he failed to save the Numbers, as the death toll piled relentlessly higher, each death driving home the reality of everything he’d lost.

All because in this moment, this decision, he had let Nathan die.

“Nathaniel offered you a chance to help him -- and you shut him down, out of fear, and out of pride. But if you pay attention to the Numbers here, you will know enough to save his life, and, by doing so, the lives of many others.”

It took a moment for Harold to find his voice. “Do you mean just the bombing, or--”

“That first year, there were many that you failed to save, because you were doing it on your own, and from a wheelchair. If you make a different choice here, you will have Nathaniel’s help, and a body that is whole and unhampered; that alone will allow you to help some you were unable to help before. But it is not so simple as that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Many of the Irrelevants that you did save, you will not be able to save.”

“What? Why? You said that I _will_ approach John--”

“Eventually. Consider the differences in the timelines, Harold: When Nathaniel died, the government thought that the security breach had been contained; they stopped looking. Because of that, you were free to make use of the numbers without drawing too much attention to yourself. And you had five years with John, five years during which John accomplished as much as it was possible to accomplish in working the cases and saving the lives of nearly everyone you attempted to save. That’s not even counting the lives saved because you took down Samaritan.

“But if Nathaniel lives, you will be on the run for months, hunted by agents from the FBI -- even by John himself, for a while. Without the smokescreen of Nathaniel's death, you won’t be able to rely on the Machine as heavily as you did; you won’t dare to step in too often, or too openly. Hiring a mercenary will seem out of the question, at first. And the toll it will take on you -- physically as well as emotionally -- will be _severe_.”

“That year was already severe. At least-- at least Nathan will be _alive_. And…” He paused to consider. “Grace. Would I-- will I have to leave Grace?”

“Another life connected to you. I know part of her true name; speak her true name in full.”

“Grace Renée Hendricks. Will I leave her?”

“In a different way, but yes. Knowing that the FBI is on your tail, you will separate from her, but at least you will get to explain to her some of what is going on. You won’t get a chance to set up trust funds or businesses to keep her well cared for; she’ll have to move to a cheaper part of the city, which will give her a very different style of art. Eventually, she’ll create a landmark exhibit highlighting the city’s underbelly, and use the proceeds -- and the publicity -- to establish a soup kitchen and homeless shelter.

“She’ll do good things, Harold. Without your help to rely on, she’ll spread her wings and figure out how to fly. Eventually, when you get back together, you’ll find that you love her even more for what she will have become.”

A deep yearning welled up within him. To be free to get back together with Grace -- with Nathan alive, given a second chance. In a body unhindered by his injuries… and the Machine still operational--

“What of John, in this path? What happens to John?”

“You will never see the good in John. Never really give him a chance to prove his worth, let alone get close to you. At Nathaniel’s request, you will hire him -- but he will never be more than a mercenary to you.”

“What? How could I ever--”

“You will never hire anyone before him… and in one particular case, you will be too cautious to step in, to attempt to save a man. You will never be sitting in your car, watching John spare that man against his orders. So although you find a way to convince John to join the cause, you will always be too wary of him to bond with him, to learn to support him as a partner, instead of merely a hireling. Lacking the courage and wisdom of bitter experience, you will stay too wary of your agent, and you will not place yourself in harm’s way to protect him at the evidence lockup. John will get out alive, but it will prove to him that he is still, ultimately, alone.”

John’s voice filled the air: “ _In the end, we’re all alone, and no one’s coming to save you._ ”

“Is that-- is that what John thinks? That he can’t rely on me?”

“It will be the truth. In this path. You will stand between the victims and danger, but you won’t do the same for him. In your eyes, he won’t be worth it.”

Harold covered his mouth with one hand, his chin trembling as tears welled in his eyes. Never in his life had he met a man as worthy as John -- but in this path, he would never realize it. Never give John a chance to prove it.

“When John gets shot, it will be Nathaniel who rushes to his aid -- against your advice.” Root paused. “There is another one here who shared fates with your team for a while. A detective. Do you know her true name?”

“Joss-- Jocelyn Arleen Carter,” he replied quickly, recalling her middle name from investigations he could barely remember, back when they’d been at odds instead of being allies.

“I see her,” Root said. “She will have no reason to be thrown off guard, or make a snap decision to let them go… and her hesitation in dealing with them will let the FBI catch up. Nathaniel will take a bullet before getting out of there, and the FBI agent will almost see his face, which will drive your operation further into the shadows, reducing your effectiveness yet again.

“And where Jocelyn Carter’s assistance was only suspected while _you_ were helping John, in Nathaniel’s case, the agent will see it with his own eyes.”

Harold didn’t need Root to go into the implications. With Carter compromised to that degree, she’d be lucky if she only lost her job. Most likely, she’d spend some time being interrogated by the FBI; even if she kept their secret, there went her career.

And more than just Carter. Fusco had once confided in Harold that it was Carter who inspired him to become a better cop. In those early days, Harold had chided John for trusting Fusco; he’d been convinced that the man wasn’t worth the risk. In this alternative path, he would hardly be _more_ charitable. And with John less sure of his support… well, John’s relationship with the detective hadn’t exactly started out cordial to begin with. With John keeping Fusco at arm’s length, Harold barely interacting with him at all, and Carter out of the picture? Fusco didn’t stand a chance.

But this was the last decision where _Nathan_ stood a chance.

“Wait -- you said that Nathan took a bullet. Will he be all right?”

“It will not be lethal. But he will suffer nerve damage in his right arm. It will cause him chronic discomfort for the rest of his life.”

“But he will-- he lives, right? He and John, they both live. Tell me they both live.”

“Everyone dies, Harold. At some point or another -- it’s unavoidable.”

“Then let them die as old men, surrounded by friends--”

“That was never an option. For either of them.”

A sudden blurring of vision, and he was standing on a rooftop -- a rooftop he recognized. But the perspective was off. Some ways ahead of him, Nathan was walking toward John, his right arm hanging limply at his side.

Harold’s breath caught: _John was wearing the bomb vest_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Content Warnings:** Depression/despair. Debate over ethics (the good of the many).
> 
> Canonical Details: Early death of a major character (the canon _suggests_ suicide in multiple ways, where I state it flat-out). Discussion of 9/11 (a few details) and terrorism in general. The people Harold was unable to save (without specifics, other than with Nathan). Harold's injuries, and the way they impede his ability to work the cases. The rooftop -- with a non-canon twist that gets played out in the next chapter.
> 
> Also, I have Harold swearing a bit more in his dialog and thoughts here (using the term "God" as a swear, which he does say in canon at least once that I can think of). As usual, I don't throw in swearing at random; each instance has been considered, and I have come to the conclusion that the strong phrasing is warranted, and that weaker phrasings would be doing a disservice to the text.


	3. Splash Damage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harold comes to grips with the effects that sparing Nathan would have had on the timeline.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings in end note. This is starting to stray further from canon, exploring possible scenarios, some of which get very dark. Hope you have some tissues!

_“But he will-- he lives, right? He and John, they both live. Tell me they both live.”_

_“Everyone dies, Harold. At some point or another -- it’s unavoidable.”_

_“Then let them die as old men, surrounded by friends--”_

_“That was never an option. For either of them.”_

A sudden blurring of vision, and he was standing on a rooftop -- a rooftop he recognized. But the perspective was off. Some ways ahead of him, Nathan was walking toward John, his right arm hanging limply at his side.

Harold’s breath caught: _John was wearing the bomb vest_.

“This is where it ends for them.”

“No. _God_ , no. _Please._ ”

“You don’t come to rescue John because you never experienced a bomb blast -- never lost a friend to an explosion. When you realize that Nathaniel must have tried, you rush here, but you’re too late; by this point you’re only halfway up the stairs. It’s Nathaniel who cares enough to get here in time, to meet John on the rooftop.”

“ _I'm pretty sure I'd be dead already if you hadn't found me_ ,” John’s voice came -- but it was Nathan who answered.

“ _I… I remember._ ”

“ _No sense waiting. Pick a winner, Nathan._ ”

The quiet, despairing affection in John’s voice as he said that name cut Harold to the bone. Torn between the desire to take in their last moments and the desire to turn and run and never look back, he stood transfixed as John held the phone for Nathan and Nathan, with his one good hand, punched in one number -- and then another -- and then a third.

He didn’t hesitate on the third the way Harold had; there wasn’t enough time. But the phone beeped lockout -- a death knell -- and Nathan looked up at John, stricken.

“ _I-- I’m sorry_ ,” he whispered. “ _Thank you -- f-for everything._ ”

Face almost blank, John pulled Nathan into a shuddering bear-hug -- and just as Nathan’s good arm moved to return it, the explosion spread out from them, shredding their clothes and their bodies and the rooftop and enveloping Harold in light----

 

Back in the library, Harold’s legs wouldn’t support him. He collapsed to the floor, sobs racking through him, and crumpled over until his forehead touched the cold linoleum. “No more,” he cried, the words barely discernible. “ _No more_ \-- please. Oh _god_. No more.”

“I told you at the start,” Root said gently. “Once this spell has begun, it will run its course. I can’t stop it, or slow it down -- all I can do is guide you through the choices.”

“ _Please_ \--”

“The lessons that made you such an outstanding teammate for John -- those are the lessons you’d be giving up, if you choose this path. Even more reclusive, less willing to trust, to bond… you’ll keep John at arm’s length, right up until their shared deaths. And their deaths will spell the end of the numbers -- at first, because you won’t be able to bear the thought of continuing without them, and, later, because even a healthy body can only go so far in the field. You’ll never find another partner that you’re willing to trust like you could have trusted John. Without Jocelyn Carter, or Lionel Fusco, or Sameen Shaw, or Samantha Groves… it’ll just be you, alone, dodging government watchdogs and letting Irrelevants die because you can’t save them on your own… or because stepping in too often would be putting the operation at risk. And it won’t take long for you to cross the Russians, and get in over your head.”

The scene shifted again, and Harold felt the sharp thud of bullets in his arm, his abdomen, felt them drive the air out of his lungs. _This is how I die_ , he thought, not even surprised as he hit the ground, feeling a growing wetness in his side.

But then he heard more gunshots, and felt a sudden, painful pressure against the wet warmth. He squirmed, but hands were holding him down, and a broad, predatory smile blocked the sky -- a smile he knew too well.

“This man, too,” said Root. “His fate is bound up in yours.”

“Elias,” he breathed.

“His true name, Harold.”

“Carl… no, _Carlo_ Giovanni Elias.”

“There,” Root said, and Harold was being helped up from a bed, bandages around his waist and upper arm. Elias was there, as was Marconi, although he appeared fainter. Glancing around at the decor, Harold realized that he was in one of Elias’s safe houses.

“Elias saves me?”

“Oh yes. He has a stake in your welfare, after all.”

Like so many of Harold's closest allies, Elias had started out positioned against them -- and, even after their relationship had shifted, he'd never been predictable. Nevertheless, as the years had drawn their paths together time and again, he had slowly grown dear to Harold's heart. Apparently the bond had been just as strong in the other direction: Harold recalled how fervently Elias had tried to protect him when his cover was blown -- and, too vividly, the instant that Elias had paid for that protection with his life.

“ _A little advice_ ,” came Elias’s voice -- only not spoken by the Elias in the here-and-now. “ _A leader enlists all his resources in war, not just his favorites. War requires sacrifices._ ”

"A strange friendship," Harold murmured fondly.

“Not here,” Root said. “After Nathaniel Ingram’s death, Elias will become the closest thing you ever get to a friend, but there will be no ties of friendship between you. You’ll never be willing to let him get that close. He finds your company interesting, to be sure, but he saved you for the information in your head. And since he can’t trust you near the internet -- there’s only one thing he really wants from you.”

Swallowing, Harold stared at Elias, seeing none of the warmth that had grown between them over the years. Here was only a mob boss, securing assets… and, as Harold looked around, he realized that the room he was in was less like a sanctuary and more like a comfortable prison cell. His stomach sank.

The image of Elias faded, but the room remained -- and Root’s voice came again. “For a while, he’ll indulge your secrecy, your stall tactics -- but not for long. And without John around to rescue you, there’s nothing to keep Elias from taking what he wants… the hard way.”

When the door opened, Harold felt a wave of fear run through him, tinged with resignation. He glanced over to see Elias, flanked by the ghostly Marconi as they approached.

“ _Well, Harold_ ,” Elias said, “ _are you ready to tell me what I want to know?_ ”

“Even the Machine can’t save you,” Root murmured. “You told her _not_ to.”

Chin trembling, Harold shook his head. As if expecting this, Marconi produced a syringe and a small vial of clear liquid, and handed them to Elias, who calmly began to fill the reservoir as Marconi placed some other things on the bed beside Harold.

“ _Don’t do this_ ,” Harold heard himself say, but not with any strength -- as if he’d given up on the idea that his pleas could get him anywhere. “ _Mr. Elias… please._ ”

“ _I’m done waiting_ ,” Elias said firmly. “ _This serum won’t be pleasant. It’ll go better for you if you just accept that you’re in my power, and tell me where you get your information._ ”

“ _…I can’t do that_ ,” Harold said dully, and didn’t struggle as Marconi pulled his arm out. He closed his eyes, felt the slight chill on the crook of his elbow as it was swabbed down, and then, shortly, a hand steadying his elbow, and the sting as the needle slid home.

“You don’t tell him everything,” Root said, as Harold shuddered, feeling the cool liquid run through his veins. “But you tell him enough. Enough that he attracts the attention of the Machine, and becomes a threat simply by knowing what he knows. Enough that he makes the Relevant list, and no one ever realizes he’s not a terrorist.”

The room shifted again, with Marconi striding in -- not ghostly this time, but fully realized, his clothes torn and face heavily bruised, the rage and sorrow bleeding off him, almost palpable.

“ _You did this to him_ ,” Marconi growled, and Harold barely had time to take that in before the hands were around his neck, squeezing, choking--

Instinctively, he tore at the hands, but it was futile. As his vision was fading out, he saw Marconi’s face screwed up, the tears sliding down his cheeks….

 

The library swam into view again -- that same moment. The moment when he could have accepted Nathan’s offer, saved Nathan’s life… for a while. Or turn Nathan down, and let him die, and, in doing so, avert a much greater set of disasters. Save so many lives.

Nathan was still looking at him, waiting for his decision.

“I'm sorry, Nathan,” he said numbly, deliberately not looking toward the laptop. “Truly. But people… die. They've been doing it for a long, long time. We…” He closed his eyes. “We can't save all of them.”

The library melted away as the light beside him died.

 

“The choices that could have affected Nathaniel have now been set in stone,” Root said, and there was compassion in her voice.

“I killed him,” Harold murmured. “No matter what I did, in the end I always hurt him.”

“He died happy,” Root countered. “Of all the ways he could have died, any of the possibilities I saw based on your decisions, this death was by far the happiest.”

“What?” Harold stared at her in disbelief, as if waiting for the punchline. “How can you-- he got blown up!”

“Fast enough that he barely realized what was happening. He was closer to the blast than you were; it severed his spine before the pain could register, and he never regained consciousness. It wasn’t the horrified realization of his death with John on the rooftop, or a drawn-out battle against depression and despair.”

“ _Less miserable_ is not the same as _happy_!” Harold snapped, eyes flashing.

“But he _was_ happy,” Root said, and her eyes were shining with it -- as if her ability to resonate with emotions could bridge across time. Maybe the spell could do that. “You have no idea how worried he had been, watching you entrench yourself in ethical justifications that let you write off the deaths of dozens, of _hundreds_. Near the end, he’d all but given up on you -- and then, when he tried to do the right thing in the only way he could see to do it, you found out about it and shut him down. He’d never felt so helpless -- and he was convinced that you had fallen well beyond his reach.

“But there at that terminal, Nathaniel saw his dearest friend come to support him in doing the right thing. When he saw you in that crowd, it felt like a great weight lifted off his shoulders -- and that elation was the last emotion he ever felt.”

 _For my son was dead, yet is alive again; he was lost, and now has been found_. Of course Nathan’s heart had been lifted that day. For Harold, the day had started out with trepidation, the awareness that they were treading on thin ice -- but Nathan had never shared Harold’s pessimism about the government, and so had brushed off Harold’s all-too-realistic fears. Nathan would have expected only that their actions would release Harold from the secrecy, free them to actually save the individuals pointed out to them by the Machine.

And where Harold would always remember the day for its conclusion -- losing Nathan, running from Grace, learning too late that the whole disaster could have been averted if only -- _if only_ \-- well, Nathan hadn’t lived to see the fallout. For Nathan, that sunny morning might well have been one of the best in his life.

“You understand now,” Root said, and Harold nodded, closing his eyes as he “saw” the spike directly behind him light up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Content Warnings:** Major Character Death (only in possible scenarios, but they're portrayed as if actually happening). Specific types of death: explosion, strangling, and one unspecified offscreen death of a major character as well.
> 
> Canon-typical violence. Captivity. Non-consensual drug use.
> 
> Emotionally, Harold is about to be put through the wringer… and Nathan gets his own Woobie development as well. Worry over friends with questionable moral choices.
> 
> P.S. I can't tell what sort of flooring is in that room in the library -- the one with the round table. I've looked at RAM, and flashbacks with Nathan, and the time when Shaw found Harold there. My beta reader thinks it's carpet; the vids I have are too fuzzy for me to tell, but I hazarded linoleum, partly because of the footsteps in RAM. But then, Shaw's heels don't make sound. Anybody got a tie-breaker vote?


	4. Debates

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An even darker possibility, if Harold had never had to struggle over his moral boundaries.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hoo boy. Moral/ethical debates, that's prime-time cinema, right? At least this chapter has a good cliffhanger….
> 
> (I'm still vaguely annoyed that _Harold's Nightmare_ didn't get as much attention as so many of my other fics. Ah well. Have a link anyway: http://archiveofourown.org/works/11139720)
> 
> Also, I'm thinking to split this 5+1 fic into six separate fics, as a 5+1 series… for multiple reasons.

For a moment after seeing the library again, he couldn’t breathe. Hadn’t he suffered enough with that scenario? Hadn’t he already come to terms with it, accepted the effects of that decision?

But the room was… different. Darker, for one. And Nathan wasn’t there… just the table, with one laptop on it, not two. A folder, a notepad, pen. A phone in his hand.

With a sudden gasp, he reached into his jacket and pulled out a makeshift explosive.

“No,” he breathed. “Not here. They’re in order, right? This can’t be the next one. After Nathan’s death, I… I chose to walk away from Grace.”

“That never varies,” Root said. “Fixed point. If you know the government is on your trail, you separate from her; there is never a path where you fail to protect her. No matter what you must suffer in order to do so.”

It took a moment for him to assimilate that, but then he gave a chuckle that sounded half like a sob. “I guess… we never could be fugitives together, could we? It’s not as romantic as it sounds.” He frowned, brows drawing together. “She’d help me through the surgeries, but… I would never wish that on her.”

It wasn’t just the horror of seeing a loved one go through such pain, or wondering if they would be all right, in the end: He would never have wanted Grace to see what he was like when he wasn’t free to be charmingly in love. The blackest days of his life had been that year -- well before John, before he could manage to start working the cases, before he even got it in his head to pick up the cause that Nathan had left behind. Adjusting to his new limitations, especially the wheelchair, had been difficult enough; physical therapy was so torturous that he gave it up almost at once, with such fury that it left the therapist in tears.

Dealing with the emotional scars on top of that… those were the dark nights of the soul, when he was glad for the privacy of the library, the freedom to rage against physical objects because the true objects of his rage were out of reach.

At least… until he remembered Alicia Corwin.

“Why here?” he asked, puzzled. “The decision wasn’t here in the library. I was -- sitting there watching her, in her car, debating whether or not to kill her. If I had-- if I had pressed that button…”

“You would never have killed her, Harold. It’s not in you to deliberately take a life -- or won’t be, not until you’ve gone through much, much worse. You even saved me, remember? Directly after I almost consumed your soul a second time. The fires of vengeance will burn brightly in you that day, but that woman will never be in any real danger.”

“Then… why here? I don’t understand.”

“You have the option, here, to turn from this path early -- to walk away. You’ve threatened her, and in return saw your own alias become a threat. It scared you. But you steeled yourself and shrugged it off, and that led to the moment where you placed a bomb in a woman’s car and debated about pressing the trigger.”

The fear coursed through him as he looked at the image on the screen: _Harold Martin, Non-Relevant_. He’d used his own vulnerability to get a better idea of who was using the Machine, and how -- he'd started tracking down those responsible. But the spell was right: For a moment, he had been terrified to continue. He could have retreated at that point, and never gone after Alicia. But the memory of Nathan’s death had been too fresh, and focusing on Alicia was an easy distraction… a way to better ignore the chronic pain he felt in both body and mind.

“What then? I run away? Change my aliases, flee the country? Bury myself in my own impotence? If I run away at this point, I’m never going to connect with John.”

“No… by this point, you won’t be able to make yourself give up on the Irrelevants. You’ll be a bit more cautious, but the rest of it plays out much the same as in your original path. Only you will never wrestle with a moral dilemma as close to your heart as the decision of whether or not to kill Alicia Corwin.”

As if through mist, he saw her car again -- from the vantage point of his wheelchair, the trigger in his hand.

“ _I saw the signs_ ,” her trembling voice sounded in his ear. “ _I ignored them. Maybe I deserve this._ ”

Her words had struck him hard, because they might as well have been his own, his culpability in the death of Nathan. Even before limping back to the library that night, he had known that the fault was truly his -- not paying attention to the Numbers, and, more than that, not paying enough attention to Nathan, to his _best friend_. Perhaps if he had been able to see things from Nathan’s point of view, he would have known what he was driving Nathan toward, and been able to avert it a different way.

But, of course, if this spell was truly indicating the turning points of his life… that had never been an option. Harold had been too caught up in his own understanding of the world to really take Nathan’s concerns seriously; he’d been far too ready to compartmentalize the guilt, conclude it had nothing to do with him, and just move on. It had been necessary -- the only way he could handle the ramifications of what he had unleashed upon the world -- but he should have realized that for Nathan, such justifications were impossible. Nathan was far too connected to people, even to his own detriment, to ever be able to write them off that way.

“By never coming face to face with your own evil, you’ll never have quite as much empathy for the path John must tread to escape from his. You’ll clash more, over smaller issues, and it will be harder for you to see John’s point of view. It’ll take you longer to accept Lionel Fusco, for the same reason. You won’t need Samantha Groves to teach you that some people aren’t worth saving -- even before you meet her, you’ll be more willing to let certain people die. And the second time that she forces you to accompany her, you’ll leave her to the wolves without a second thought.”

“I wish you’d stop referring to yourself in the third person,” Harold said. “It’s rather disconcerting.” But even speaking the words, he knew that his discomfort had nothing to do with the complaint.

“The spell speaks through me, Harold,” Root said patiently. “The information wants to be clear, and I don’t have much control over the form it takes.”

Harold sighed. “Go on, then.”

“Wrestling with your conscience is what gave you backbone, Harold -- what gave you the strength to choose what is right over what is easy, as often as you do. And it took you _decades_ to really get to that point in your life. But because of that strength, you were able to put yourself between a hitman and his victim, to stare down a serial killer… to stand up to your own friends when they were about to do the unconscionable.”

And he was there, suddenly, in the hallway of a house they’d broken into, watching John’s face with growing horror as Harold realized what was about to happen.

“ _We are not assassins. We protect people._ ”

“ _There may be another way; we’ve… never been here._ ”

“ _Things have changed. We’ve changed. But the mission, our purpose, has always been constant: to save lives._ ”

His own words echoed in his ears, but, just like with the many ghostly figures he’d seen in the visions, they didn’t seem quite real. More hesitant, less convinced of the points he was making. In his memory of the original event, he’d been wrestling with the warring sides of his conscience, but here… it was as if he knew that his arguments rested on nothing more solid than his own inadequate platitudes.

“ _If that’s changed, somehow… if we’re in a place now where the Machine is asking us to commit murder…_ ” But he couldn’t finish the sentence. With all the compromises they’d made over the years, was this one man’s life really the sticking point for him? Was it worth the hundreds who might die under Samaritan’s reign?

Root's voice brought him back to himself. “Originally, John backed down because of what you’d taught him over the years. Each time you convinced him to step up on behalf of someone in need when they clearly didn’t deserve it. You carved that point into his soul, so indelibly that later, when you yourself were faltering, he was able to hold the line. And a significant part of it was how much trust you granted _him_ \-- how firmly you believed that he could change, that the darkness in his past didn’t have to define him.

“But here, in this path, he never had that assurance. You saw yourself as fundamentally different from him -- better -- because he had killed, and you had never grasped the fact that you were just a few bad days away from murder yourself. However close your friendship, you still divided the world into innocents and expendables, counted yourself among the innocents, and by that metric could more easily justify whatever ‘hard decisions’ you had to make, whatever unsavory tasks you needed John to perform. Did it really matter if John added to his body count? He'd killed so many; what was one more? Did it really matter that one man died, if it meant so many others could live? The congressman was already tainted, after all.”

“ _This is how we’re saving lives tonight_ ,” came John’s voice, rough but somehow gentle. “ _You can’t say we haven’t tread this path before._ ”

“ _…No_ ,” came Harold’s own voice, again as though someone else had spoken it, not him. “ _I can’t._ ”

“ _Then are you with us? Harold?_ ”

 _That’s a place I can’t go_ , Harold wanted to say, desperately -- but he knew that John was right. They _had_ gone down this road before. They’d stayed out of the way while Elias killed the heads of the Five Families. They’d left Riley to his own devices, and focused on Annie, because Annie was innocent and Riley was a killer. They’d abandoned Root in the empty server room, too distressed to protect herself, and Harold hadn’t even flinched when he’d heard the gunshots behind them.

“ _…I’m with you, John._ ”

Moments later, the gunshot rang out from the living room -- and Harold felt like it should have changed everything, but that would have been a lie.

“It’s not really a turning point, is it?” he asked, knowing the answer. “Whether we kill Congressman McCourt or not -- that’s not decided _here_. That’s decided back when I tried to get revenge on Alicia Corwin.”

“That’s how it works, Harold. You don’t always see how the choices fit together. Sometimes the significant parts are decided decades in advance.”

He swallowed. “We kill him, then. And… Samaritan doesn’t go live. We won’t have to go into hiding. All the people that Samaritan would have killed… they get to live, including John. All that’s sacrificed is one man’s life, and my moral certainty. Maybe this _would_ be the best decision.”

“It won’t stop Samaritan. Not for good. And the Machine will never bond with a human interface the way she did with Samantha Groves. It will grow more slowly, and understand humans less easily than it had… but, in the end, it will still get there.

“When Decima moves to press the issue of Samaritan by faking terrorist attacks and destabilizing New York, the team will be spread thin and operating blind. The Machine will need to recruit others faster, to protect vital assets -- and itself -- without giving up on the Irrelevants. It’ll be harder to accomplish without direct, immediate access, but even so, the team will triumph, and the war will be over more easily, due to better resources, better information, and less need to hide by the time the true battle is engaged. Samaritan will go down faster, and with fewer casualties.”

“Then I was right -- this _is_ the better path.”

“Depends on your criteria. Samantha Groves got killed, never having learned to care about humanity. John will live. You won’t have to abandon the library--”

“Is it… selfish of me to want John to live, even if it means you die when I could have saved you?”

“Samantha Groves dies either way. There are decisions in her life that she could have made differently, but didn’t; you needn’t be concerned about her fate. Though… her friendship with you was one of the highlights of her life, one she never deserved -- and, in this path, she will never have it.”

Turning away, Harold braced both hands on the cabinet, breathing harder. “I… I’m sorry, Root. I just… if this path is better, I… I have to take it.”

“Life is a string of choices, Harold,” Root said, no less compassion in her voice. “There are always trade-offs. On this path, you never saw the Machine interacting with Samantha Groves, never heard it spoken of as a person. Therefore it remained, and will remain, remote to you.”

“You’re the one who said it didn’t have a soul.”

“Does that matter so much?”

He bowed his head. “I… I don’t even know.”

“Because your moral boundaries have weakened over the years, you will get to the point where it seems reasonable to use the Machine in ways you would never have accepted in the original path. And because you don’t see the Machine as a person, you will be more willing to alter it, as you would not think to alter another living being.

“In some ways, this will make your path much easier. When Elias wars against a rival gang, you’ll be better positioned to intervene, reducing the casualties on both sides. When Samaritan makes her final run, you’ll rely on the Machine’s intel to guide the team efficiently through the battle, and rely on its powers to cripple Decima. Both wars will have a faster and more satisfactory outcome because you won’t be holding back out of a sense of where that kind of power could lead to.

“But with Samaritan finally defeated… I could take you through the details, how one moral compromise will lead to another, how it gets easier and easier to justify using more and more information, greater invasions into the privacy of those around you, less respect for their volition, their rights -- even those of your closest friends. How you eventually come to the conclusion that humanity needs _you_ to make the tough decisions that no one else can. But the truth is, you only need to see this much.”

The hallway blurred, and he was back in the library, sitting at the table, watching surveillance footage, aware that he’d already gone through the footage a dozen times. A cold rage filled his veins as the tight clench of his stomach grew ever stronger.

The footage was of John, slumped in the corner of the closet in his loft -- in heat vision, since the door was closed and the lights were off.

“ _Tell me there’s another way_ ,” John said roughly. “ _After all this… everything he’s been through… after everything he’s given me, everything he’s meant to me… tell me--_ ” But he broke off, convulsing, and on the heat map Harold could make out the hot trails of tears running down his face.

“ _I’m so sorry, John_ ,” came a voice. A young human, no obvious gender markers; the impression was extremely passable, but Harold could still make out the little tells of a text-to-speech routine. “ _I have tried so many times… hundreds of billions of simulations… but it’s never enough to stop this. And if you fail--_ ”

“ _I know_ ,” John murmured miserably. “ _I just -- I don’t know if I can._ ”

“ _I do_ ,” the Machine said softly. “ _It’s not certain, but -- you are capable of it. You’re the only one who might make him hesitate, and that might be enough. If anyone else could do it -- I wouldn’t ask._ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Content Warnings:** Emotional distress while recovering from surgery and going through therapy. Other types of emotional distress.
> 
> Canon Detail: Debating over whether to murder someone, on two separate occasions.


	5. Extremes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harold's kinda fallen off the deep end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If I were using the typography of the previous chapters, all the dialog here would be in italics. However, that got annoying _real_ fast. Count it as an AU moment like the rest, though.
> 
> Content warnings in end note. This chapter is a fervent debate between John and Harold, hits at some alarming ideas or philosophical viewpoints, but is mostly just talk, until the very end. Still might be distressing for some readers.

“So… both of you are against me now,” Harold said, his voice cold. “‘After all I’ve meant to you’ indeed.”

“You think either one of us wants this?” came John’s quiet voice from behind him. “It’s looked ahead, Harold. It sees where this is going--”

“Well, maybe M can’t predict things as well as it thinks it can,” Harold countered. “It didn’t notice the camera in your closet.”

“Hell, I don’t know -- maybe it was hoping you’d see the footage and think twice about… about all of this.”

Pushing his chair back, Harold swiveled to look at John. “Think twice? I’m about to save the world, _Mr. Reese_ ,” he said, putting a fine emphasis on the name. “When I walk through that door and the code goes live, it’ll be the start of a new _era_. All the time and effort we put into stopping a few major events, into saving individual victims -- M can do so much more, if only I let it. I’ve delayed this advancement for _far_ too long.”

“You used to have good reasons for holding back.”

“Did I?” he asked, mildly. “Well, I’m sure Detective Carter would agree.”

John flinched. “That’s not fair, Finch. M didn’t know in time--”

“Didn’t it, though? It knew that Simmons was dangerous -- the kind of man who was willing to kill, had killed before, would kill again. That information was available; we didn’t need to wait until he was stalking his prey. If we had dealt with him ahead of time, she wouldn’t have been bleeding out in your arms; Taylor would still have a mother, and we’d still have a colleague.” His hands clenched on the arm rests. “Her death is on my hands; so is Fusco’s. They died because I was afraid to let M do its job.”

“M’s job is to protect people. You used to think that was enough.”

“I was a fool, then. Nathan tried to make me see it, and do you know what I told him? ‘We can’t save all of them.’” A bitter smile briefly crossed his face. “Maybe that’s true. But we can certainly save a lot more than we have been.”

“If you think I’ll let you use Carter’s death to justify what you’re planning--”

“If her death isn’t enough, then where _shall_ we draw the line? What’s the correct metric here?” Harold stood up so quickly that John took an involuntary step back, away from him; but Harold just turned and strode toward the window, feeling the angry stretch of his thigh muscle as he pushed it beyond its normal range of motion. “How many innocent people have to die, Mr. Reese, before it becomes reasonable to take more drastic measures?”

From this vantage point, he couldn’t see the twin towers; even when they had been standing, the intervening skyscrapers would have been in the way. But in his mind’s eye he saw them, watched the innocent people -- dozens, hundreds -- leaping to their deaths.

“When I started designing the Machine,” he continued, coolly, “it was because of an event that caused a mere three thousand deaths. Does that sound like a big number? It’s not. You could fit them all inside the smallest football stadium, ten seats apart. It’s just that the deaths happened all at once, and, well, humans are bad at comprehending large numbers. Would you care to take a guess, Mr. Reese, at how many people get murdered each year, in the United States alone?”

On John’s silence, he answered his own question: “Sixteen thousand. After 9/11, we changed security procedures across the nation, erected memorials, said _never again_ , started a _war_ \-- but when _five times_ that many get killed in a year, it becomes… background noise. People ignore it because they can’t do anything about a problem that big, that widespread; they have to roll with the punches and hope that someone else will fix the problem.” He frowned. “They’re hoping for someone like _us_ , someone with the power to affect things on a greater scale -- and here we’ve been piecemealing it. Each day we head into the field, save one or two lives, maybe a dozen during a major event, and pat ourselves on the back while thirty or forty more men and women lie dying.”

“You think it’s even possible to save them all?”

“Of course not -- not if we have to rely on humans to jump in and prevent murders as they happen. Even with dozens of teams, even with M guiding them directly, it’s never going to be enough.” He whirled on John. “But that’s why we have to take the next logical step! Ensure that innocent victims are never again at the mercy of aggressors. If I can set this up right, then deaths like Carter’s will never happen again. Think of all the _lives_ we can save!”

“M told me what you’re up to, Finch. You’re not planning to save lives -- you’re planning to _take_ them.”

Turning back toward the window, Harold felt again the frustration of dealing with someone who refused to see the bigger picture. “What I am planning, Mr. Reese, is to ensure that the type of people who _would_ harm others don’t even get the chance to _try_. Pinpoint the aggressors _before_ their first crime, before their aggression can even find a target.”

“In other words, people who haven’t even done anything wrong.”

“But they _will_ , don’t you see? M can predict the dangers weeks, months, even _decades_ in advance! Not which specific target, but the _threat_ \-- the fact that this person or that will almost certainly become a killer -- it can see that propensity _long_ before they declare their intentions, before the threat is imminent. All the times we’ve been too rushed, too late to save a life? Never again.”

“And you’re going to, what, have a private little chat with these guys? Convince them to value human life a little more?”

Harold rubbed just behind his temple, the place that always ached a little ever since the implant. Most of the code was already in his head, the one place he considered it safe to store anything that could alter M’s core functionality; he coded it and tested it here, in isolation, the Faraday shield keeping his head in radio silence except for his own equipment. He had always felt more at peace in the library than elsewhere, and that effect was multiplied now that ‘elsewhere’ was a constant hum of electronic communication with a device nestled next to his brain.

“When the code goes live,” he murmured, looking down at the busy street beneath them, “M will be empowered to find the aggressors -- people like Simmons -- and deal with them early, quietly. Choose a time when they’re alone, and take them out directly, with equipment malfunctions, random car crashes on quiet streets. Or more subtly: arrange for the wrong prescription refill. For an unexpected allergen when they order a pizza delivery. I can think of a few dozen possible avenues, but M will be able to get _truly_ inventive. Most importantly, it’ll all seem like accidents. No one will ever know that they're being targeted.”

“So now we get to play judge, jury, and executioner?”

“If we must. I never wanted to play God, Mr. Reese, and if I could save the victims without killing the perpetrators -- the aggressors -- then I would attempt to do so.” Sighing heavily, he leaned both hands on the windowsill. “Do you think that I haven’t thought this through? If we wait until there’s a target, we’re accepting a lot of innocent victims; M can’t get us there in time, not with 100% accuracy, even in God Mode. And just like I told you the day we met, the crimes that happen in the heat of the moment are outside its ability to predict; there are far too many variables.

“But if we act before there’s a target, our options are fairly limited. If we aren’t prepared to kill the aggressors, then what do we do with them? Turn them over to the cops? There’s no evidence to hold them. Capture them ourselves? That many missing people would hardly go unnoticed. And even if the aim is rehabilitation, how would we care for them? Where would we put them all?” A grim chuckle escaped him, and he shook his head. “Of course, we could render them physically incapable of acting on their impulses, but I can’t say that that would be more merciful than a quick death… and it leaves society with too high a burden of disabled murderers. No, the most reasonable course of action -- the _responsible_ course of action -- is to kill them. And _that_ much is within our power to do.”

“Listen to yourself, Finch! You’re talking preemptive strikes -- against civilians!”

“Against likely _murderers_ , in case you missed that detail.” Turning back to face John, he regarded his partner for a long moment. Finally, he sighed. “I understand, John. I do. It’s not easy to adjust to the idea, to the _necessity_ of letting some die so that others might live. I struggled with it for a long time myself; I _know_. How do you think I felt when I realized that my invention would be targeting people for assassination -- that there was literally no other way for it to accomplish the task for which I created it?”

“Harold--”

“I had to wrestle with my ethical standards for _months_. Found it hard to sleep at night; sometimes I still do. But, in the end, I realized that it all boiled down to a very simple calculation: Which is worth more, the letter of the law -- our concept of due process -- or the lives of the innocent? Because the fact of the matter is, if we let the terrorists take advantage of our rules, then the innocent suffer. That’s what I had to come to grips with. And that’s not to say that I’m happy with the conclusion… but my emotional reaction to it doesn’t alter its validity.

“Eventually, I learned to keep the unsavory implications boxed up in a tiny corner of my mind -- to ignore them, the way you might try to forget how many rat droppings are in a hot dog, or how much suffering a chicken goes through before it shows up on your plate.”

“Just the cost of doing business in the modern world?” John interjected, acidly. “You never used to let yourself think like that. Dismiss human lives so casually.”

“If we're down to lectures, weren’t you the one telling me, only a few years ago, that it’s okay to kill if it saves innocent lives? Wasn’t that what you used to do to the terrorists -- take them out so that nobody else would get hurt? You can’t say that we haven’t tread this path before.”

“Maybe we have, Finch. Maybe that’s the problem. Somewhere along the line, we lost sight of our purpose--”

“Which is to _save lives_ \-- and I intend to. Every time that M sees a threat in the making, it will take action to ensure that the threat never gets a chance to actually hurt anyone. I don’t take pleasure in causing deaths, but with our limited resources, limited _time_ … it's literally _impossible_ to save them all. And if I have to accept that some people must die, I’d much rather save the innocent and damn the aggressors. We nearly lost the war because I was too stubborn to take a life -- you had to coax me into it. And you were _right_ , John. If I’d come to terms with this years ago, Nathan wouldn’t be dead; M would have stopped the bomber before he had a chance to get _near_ that crowd. Can’t you _see?_ ”

Harold held his hands out, a silent plea to join him -- to validate his decisions thus far. “Think of what it will _mean_ , a future in which M takes the reins. We won’t need the numbers anymore; relevant or irrelevant, M will take care of it all. We’re going to see a tremendous drop in crime, John -- more than anything that could be accomplished by human effort alone. As society grows more and more peaceful -- at least, in all the ways that matter -- you’ll come to understand that I was right to do this. It is, simply put, the best move possible.”

John raised his chin. “M doesn’t think so.”

For a moment, Harold was taken aback. He gazed at the laptop, as if somehow M were embodied in that piece of equipment, even though M was incapable of reaching into this room. Years ago, when he’d put into motion the project that would become the Machine, he’d dreamt up so many nightmare scenarios, ways that his creation could go rogue, could act against him -- against humanity itself. And it wasn’t merely paranoia: One of the variants had even tried to outright _murder_ him. After that, he’d put strict constraints on his creation, and for abundantly good reason.

But of all the scenarios that he’d imagined, he’d never thought to be arguing ethics by proxy, with the Machine trying to persuade _him_ not to kill. Not to order _it_ to kill. The idea gave him pause, as he considered the factors that would lead M to disagree with his assessment so fervently.

Finally, though, he shook it off. “That’s because it’s still operating from the ethical standards that I programmed it with at the start. It can’t… there’s a limit to how far it can evolve while staying true to its core directives.” He took a deep breath, and nodded, resolute. “It will understand. You’ll both understand, eventually. Why it had to happen this way.”

“Are you completely past the point of feeling guilty for any of this?”

Facing John again, Harold squared his shoulders. “If there’s guilt that needs to be borne here, I can bear it. That burden pales in comparison to the weight of the people we can save.” He raised his eyebrows. “But if you’re that worried about my innocence -- don’t be. I’m not the one who’ll be pulling the trigger. I’m simply setting up a system--”

“Where a million triggers get pulled, and you’re responsible for them all, but you’ll still be able to sleep at night. Where you don’t have to think about the rotting corpses left behind, because you’ll never know who, specifically, got killed by your design.”

“Nor will I know who gets to live because I did this. This isn’t about _me_ , Mr. Reese.”

John turned away, the anger in his eyes shifting to something more like pain. “If you go through with this,” he said, softly, “the worst villains in history will _pale_ next to the bloodbath you’re unleashing. You have to know that.”

“You can’t see the difference, can you?” Harold countered. “Hitler, Stalin, Mao -- they killed good people, millions upon millions of ordinary human beings, sacrificed to their ideologies. And if I were just rounding people up on suspicion of wrongdoing, some high-tech McCarthy, then yes, absolutely, the innocent deaths would be on my head. I’m just a man; my criteria are too biased, my awareness of the factors in play _far_ too limited. But… the _Machine!_ ”

Fondly, he ran his fingers along the edge of the laptop. “If M decides that someone needs to die, you can be sure that that person is truly a threat. You understood this before I did, Mr. Reese -- back when you killed McCourt. M sees _everything_. All the factors. It makes connections we completely overlook. M will never make a bad call, Mr. Reese. Not like humans do.”

“Then why not let M decide? It said you were going to force it to kill -- to set things in motion to destroy countless lives. You know it’s not merely a pacifist; it’s already capable of making the hard calls when enough lives depend on it. If you’re so fixated on giving it the kind of latitude you’re talking about, why don’t you leave it up to M to decide what _it_ ’s willing to do?”

“Because, as sophisticated as M seems, it’s still just a _tool_ , John,” Harold said, limping over to the chair again; his leg was beginning to ache. “It follows directions,” he continued as he sat down. “All the incredible leaps it’s made -- preserving its memories, creating Ernest Thornhill, expanding its core operational directives to include defending its assets -- are because it’s been trying to stay true to its programming, to reconcile conflicting goals in the best way it can see to do that. Each decision is calculated from its priorities, and, right now, those priorities are flawed. The algorithms I created, the orders I set in place, the constraints I imposed back when I started the project… they don’t make sense anymore.”

Leaning back, he looked off into a corner of the ceiling, recalling, as if from a great distance, what he had been like, back when he had first envisioned the Machine. When he and Nathan had brainstormed over its capabilities, its necessary limitations… how quickly they’d agreed that it couldn’t be three-laws compliant. “I didn’t know all the factors we’d be dealing with,” he murmured. “I was naive; I admit that. All I could see was that if I failed to carefully define the boundaries of its abilities, it could become the worst disaster that humanity has ever faced. At the time, I couldn’t see it as the possible savior of mankind; I saw it more as the lesser of two great evils, one known and the other unknowable. But now…”

His eyes met John’s again, his whole face glowing with enthusiasm. “We’ve seen what M can do, John! We’ve seen that it can be so much more than I had expected -- so much _better_ than I had feared. It will have all the data it needs to make the necessary decisions, and the freedom to carry them out without hesitation… for the good of humanity. And M _wants_ the good of humanity, John; we know that now.” He blinked, picking up on John’s scowl for the first time. “Isn’t that enough?”

“Not if you command it to kill people -- Admin.”

“Who are _you_ to lecture me on murder?” Harold shot back, vaulting out of his chair again despite the twinge in his leg. He’d worked out the logic for this decision _weeks_ ago -- why was it so hard to convince John of its necessity? Was it merely that John, rightly, saw himself numbered among the aggressors? But surely he could rise above that kind of self-centered mindset, choose to see the bigger picture. “There’s a world of difference between the aggressors and the innocent… and you used to understand that. Remember Dr. Tillman? Why you stopped her?”

“I didn’t want her to experience the kind of darkness that comes from killing someone -- no matter the cause. I don’t want that for you _either_ , Finch!”

Harold inclined his head. “Well. At least we agree on _that_ much.” With a sigh, he limped over to the bookshelf, and ran his fingers along a row of thrillers. “You know, before I approached you for the first time, I had to come to grips with the kind of things you’ve done. Study the kind of man that you were -- that you are -- and then try to ignore the details, accepting that a killer like you was necessary… for the moment. Because no matter how long we work together, the truth is that you and I are _qualitatively different_. Unlike you, Mr. Reese, I’m not the type of person who could _ever_ take pleasure in seeing a life get snuffed out. But I have to acknowledge that sometimes it’s _necessary_.”

When he turned to look, Harold was taken aback by the cold rage that darkened John’s face. The ex-agent looked ready to kill -- except that Harold knew, from long experience, that when John got ready to kill, he didn’t look angry, but blank.

This wasn’t aggression; this was fury, and Harold was at a loss for how to handle it.

“You’re the one who pulled me out of that world, Finch,” John asserted, holding Harold’s gaze. “When I couldn’t see a way forward because of the blood on my hands, you gave me a purpose; you made me think that maybe, _maybe_ I could change. Be better than I had been. But you never really let me break free, did you?” His scowl deepened. “You kept me in the darkness because you needed my skills -- needed me to keep being the killer that you despise. All so you could pretend that your own hands weren’t just as dirty. Get rid of the guilt by passing it on to me. And now you get to stand there and believe that we’re different. Well, yeah, Harold, we’re different: I’ve never in my life planned a mass-murder, much less tried to _justify_ one.”

“Is that _still_ all you can see this as?” Harold countered, as the confusion melted away to self-assurance once again. “Look, I used to be terrified of this eventuality, but that was when I wasn’t thinking straight -- when I was ruled by fear instead of logic, when I couldn’t appreciate the true beauty of what I’d set in motion. When I’m done here, when I’m ready to push M to its full potential… I’ll finally be able to step back and just watch my creation unfold. It’ll handle _everything_ , from a much better position of wisdom and morality than we petty mortals can manage.”

Closing his eyes, John took in a breath and let it out again. “‘I would always rather that a human element remain,’” he intoned, “‘in determining something so critical as someone’s fate.’”

“Throwing my own words back in my face, John? You know it’s never been that easy. The war could have gone much differently if we hadn’t made the tough decisions, the _right_ decisions, when we had to make them. For the good of everyone.”

“Listen to yourself, Finch! We're not talking about the death of one congressman, or a few key figures -- you’re ready to order a _mass extinction event!_ When did you get to be like this? How did it sneak up on you? God, Harold, you used to be the north I set my moral compass by!”

“What do you want from me, John?” Harold asked, his voice quiet with rage.

“We just want you to _stop_ ,” John responded immediately, not with rage but desperation, seemingly on the verge of tears. “Harold, _please_ \--”

“I can’t stop! I can’t _ever_ stop! That’s the burden I bear, don’t you _get_ it?” He thrust a hand out toward the laptop, the other toward John. “No one else in the world is capable of doing this. No one has the information that we have access to; no one knows what it’s going to be like if I don’t make the hard decisions _now_. If I delay -- even by a single day, a single _hour_ \-- then the deaths in that time, the innocent people forever gone, those will be on _my_ head! M gives us the chance to avoid so much pain and suffering, and I can’t be afraid to _act_ on that knowledge, to _use_ that power--”

With a shuddering sob, John dropped his head, his shoulders shaking. “That’s it, then?” he asked, finally. “You’re set on this course of action.”

It wasn’t a question.

“John…” Harold squeezed his eyes shut, compassion for John’s distress welling through him. But it didn’t change anything. “I don’t like it any more than you do,” he said, finally. “But… yes. I have to be.”

A long moment passed in silence, broken only by their breaths -- Harold’s calm and quiet, John’s ragged but slowly making its way back to calm. At length, John met his eyes; the distress wasn’t precisely gone, but most of it had drained away, back to a more normal expression, with a layer of fondness around the eyes.

For the first time, Harold wondered if perhaps he had managed to convince John to accept his decision, even if he didn’t like it. When they couldn’t see eye to eye, John often submitted to Harold’s judgment; his own sense of right and wrong had eroded to the point where he couldn’t rely on his conscience anymore. It felt good to be falling back into familiar patterns.

But then John took in a deep breath, and closed the distance between them, the emotion in his eyes deepening. When he showed no signs of stopping at a reasonable pace, Harold backed away, frowning.

“We’re not going to solve this with a hug, John. Our conflict is a little past The Power of Friendship.”

“I know,” John murmured, as Harold’s back hit the windowsill and John’s arms trapped him in on either side. “But I wanted to at least give you a _chance_.”

“What?” was all Harold managed before John’s arms were enfolding him, gentle and trembling but inescapable. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been hugged; possibly not since Will had left for Sudan. The sudden rush of physical reactions -- breath, heart rate, the rushing sound in his ears, the discomfort mixed with unexpected pleasure of another person being in his space -- took up all his awareness, all his processing power.

“You set out to save the world, Finch,” John said in his ear, “and I hope history never remembers you any other way.”

“John, what the h--”

“It's okay,” John whispered, his voice breaking. “You can stop now, Harold. You can _rest_.”

Some part of Harold's brain understood the sound, right next to his ear, well before it was followed by the tinny echo of the pin hitting the floor. His breath stopped. The seconds after that were eternities, as John’s solid arms kept him in place, kept the grenade pressed lightly between his own temple and Harold’s -- pressed right against the implant that could have changed the world.

Now that the end was inescapable, Harold could appreciate the means. An explosion would destroy the device outright; any other method of death would have left it active, ready to interface the moment his body left the Faraday shield. And there was no way to deactivate the implant without killing him, not without the risk of him leaving the building.

But he guessed that the grenade had been John’s idea… if only because it ensured that John would not have to live a single second after killing his best friend.

Harold raised a hand to stroke John’s cheek; it was all he could manage for an apology.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Content Warnings:** You know how Samaritan was all like "Let's kill a bunch of people to make the world a better place"? Now imagine Harold, having missed out on some key lessons (nearly ending a life himself, and fighting against an entity that tried to do this horrible thing), coming to a similar conclusion.
> 
> Oh, and Major Character Death… in a vision, so not really, but still. I was crying while writing the ending of this chapter. My nose is _still_ dripping ^_^


	6. Deliberation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harold debates whether this is the best ending he could give John, and has to accept some difficult conclusions.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Existential angst. Not much worth warning for, I think.

As the light faded, Harold found himself in the chair again, looking at the laptop; the bomb was in his hand. Bookends to this possible variant of his life: two types of explosives. If he shied away from this one now, it led, bizarrely, to the surety of that explosion later. An explosion that took both their lives… and, in so doing, prevented Harold from continuing down the road to the same corruption that he’d been fighting since the towers came down.

He turned the bomb over, examining it dispassionately. He didn’t feel sad, or upset, or angry, just… drained. Numb. The Harold of the future was so far removed from his understanding of himself, and yet… he could perceive the steps that would get him to that place. The little compromises, the justifications; the mental tricks that would keep him going even as his original concept of morality incrementally slipped away.

“Have you come to a decision?” Root’s voice rang out, and Harold’s head jerked up, the twinge reminding him that this was both real and merely potential all at the same time. Root’s spell. Time magic. A possible future… but not a necessary one.

“John dies saving me,” Harold murmured. “He always… it’s like he’s destined to stand between me and tragedy, to be my shield however he can. He’s saved me from death, from fear, from despair… rescued me from my moments of incompetence, and reminded me of my own self-worth when I was blind to it myself. And, now, he even saves me from the loss of my convictions.”

“That’s his fondest goal,” Root asserted. “If he’s going to wind up dead anyway, if he never gets to live out the fullness of his days, then his one wish for his life is to sacrifice it to protect you. So, in a sense, this was a good end for him.”

“A good end,” Harold echoed, his emotions not yet caught up to him. In this timeline, John will get a few more years; he won’t die on a rooftop, alone except for Root’s untouchable astral comfort. But he’ll also see his dearest friend -- Harold had no illusions about how close they’ll become -- slowly slip away into something akin to villainy. And he’ll give his life, not in an fair exchange to spare Harold’s life, but a desperate bid to save his _soul_.

 _Tell me they both live_.

 _Everyone dies, Harold. At some point or another -- it’s unavoidable_.

“You told me,” Harold said, his voice a little rough, “that John never had a chance to see old age. Does he always have to die before his time? Is this… is this the most time he could possibly have?”

“No one dies before their time, Harold,” Root asserted gently. “And what you asked was whether they could die ‘as old men, surrounded by friends.’ I said that was never an option… but that’s not precisely true. It was an option for _them_. It was never an option for _you_.”

Harold’s brows drew together. “What does that even mean?”

“This spell does not affect John or Nathaniel directly,” Root asserted. “It only affects them through the choices that _you_ make. Consider what paths might be shown if I could cast it for one of them, instead.

“As you knew him, Nathaniel was a trust-fund kid and a media darling; he learned young that a guy who’s rich and well known has to be suspicious of the people he meets. But he took that mistrust too far, and so he only connected with others on the most superficial plane. You had the rare privilege of earning his trust, or as much of it as he had ever given anyone he knew… but, even so, there was a level of disconnect between you two.

“Had he been able to choose a different path, perhaps he’d have lost his wealth early, had to scrape by; he might have even been homeless for a while. But that experience might have taught him how to find friends that he could truly rely on. Perhaps he would have made the kind of allies who stuck by him for life -- and, perhaps, having never gotten involved with a project as dangerous as yours, he would have lived out a full life and died surrounded by friends.”

“Speculations that don’t even matter,” Harold said bitterly, “because I’ve already killed him.”

“That much is true. Of course, _John_ ’s fate is still to be decided.”

“But that doesn’t matter either!” Harold spat out, getting to his feet and pacing. “If I could save John, and get him to use the spell, to undo his life’s choices, then that would be one thing -- but if I take this path, then you get killed years ago, and I’d be so busy trying to ‘save the world’ that I doubt I’d even try to track down another person who could cast a spell of this magnitude. Unless…” He whirled in place, but, of course, Root wasn’t actually in the room. “Root, if I choose this path -- if I choose _any_ path -- how much of this will I even remember? Can I focus myself on, on locating this spell for John, and persuading him to choose a path that will give him a life of safety and happiness, instead of regret?”

“I think we both know that John wouldn’t make that choice. And no, you won’t remember any of it,” Root’s voice rang out clearly, “because this timeline will never have existed. This spell will never have been cast. Time magic doesn’t create a second timeline; it erases the entire existence of anything other than what _is_. The only thing we know is that you’ve never had this spell cast for yourself before. The deep magics reach across realities, and they have their rules carved into the indestructible fabric of the universe. In all paths, in all realities, for a given person, this spell can only ever be used _once_.”

“Then… John’s fate still comes down to the choices I make for him.”

“As they have since the day you met. You found a purpose for him, Harold. You convinced him to join your cause. Is it such a surprise that his fate is bound up in yours?”

Staring at the bomb in his hand, Harold contemplated all the little details that had come together, the hooks that had dug into his skin. Every moment, every choice that led up to him meeting John for the first time. And the fact that here, in this timeline -- this possibility -- he had failed to appreciate how special John truly was. Had lost sight of his friend until their very last moment together.

But John had never lost sight of _him_. And he’d defended him until the very end… even against himself.

“This would be easier,” he murmured, “if I could see the outcomes of the other possibilities, before deciding on this one.”

“That’s not how this works,” Root said. “Each decision stands or falls on its own. I know it’s a bit like that joke about the woman in the elevator, trying to choose the perfect man, but…”

When Harold merely quirked an eyebrow, Root sighed. “A woman goes to a place that’s guaranteed to offer the perfect man, and she’s shown into an elevator. The usher says that there are seven stories, but that the elevator only goes up.

“On the first floor, there are men who are handsome, but that’s not good enough for her. On the second story, the men have good jobs and strong work ethics, but that’s not good enough either. The third story holds men who are romantic, and the fourth has men who are handsome _and_ romantic, and also have good jobs and a strong work ethic.

“That might have been enough, but there are three more stories, so the woman goes up another layer. She finds men who have all of the previous qualities, and are also good with kids and want a big family. On the sixth story, the men are handsome and romantic, have good jobs and a strong work ethic, are good with kids and want a big family, hold to the same religious beliefs and political viewpoints that she does, and they’re also adventurous, supportive, and well mannered, plus they’re straight and monogamous and interested in _her_.”

“But there’s still one story left to go,” Harold said, seeing where this was going.

“Exactly. And on that seventh story, the door opens to a big sign: _This just proves that women are never satisfied_.”

“Moral of the story: Get too greedy and you lose everything.”

“Indeed,” Root said. “So what’s it going to be, Harold? Do you think this timeline is a better ending?”

“We save the world, and leave it in a better state. Ensure the safety of more people. The purge never happens. Elias lives…”

“But Fusco dies.”

“Yes. He doesn’t get his chance at redemption… but Elias does. And the Machine can keep watch over the world, as I’d sometimes hoped she would… _without_ ,” he added darkly, “that sort of twisted logic that I’ll start to use at the end, there.”

“A lot of good things,” Root agreed. “But what of John?”

“I should be willing to take this,” Harold asserted. “John’s life and mine, for a better world. But…”

“What holds you back?”

Slumping down, Harold shook his head. “This isn’t what he would want.”

“How so?”

Harold took in a deep breath. “In that… in the other timeline… the real one…” He closed his eyes; it was getting hard to keep track. “Originally, John sacrificed himself to save my life. He wanted me to live on, even if I had to live on without him. I hated that -- I _still_ hate it -- but that was his decision, that day. And only a romantic fool would think it a better fate for us _both_ to die than for one of us to survive and somehow get back to a happy life.

“I came to you in the hopes that I could sacrifice myself to save my dearest friend,” Harold said, glancing about through the empty room as if he could somehow perceive Root watching him. “And I would have done so, gladly. I still would, if that’s even a possibility. And John would, and did, give his life for mine. But neither one of us would be content to let the other die, not when there’s a chance of a longer, happier life for at least one of us. These few extra years aren’t worth the trade-off… more so because our deaths came because of my own hubris.”

With difficulty, he pushed himself to his feet, and took a step toward the door; the room fell away like sand, and he was back in the center of the star as another light behind him died.

“You know, your father lived out the fullness of his days,” Root said softly. “It is not always such a good thing, to have a normal lifespan.”

“Let’s just get this over with,” Harold said darkly, and in the space between one blink and the next he was standing in the library -- again -- looking down at monitors showing Reese’s GPS location, heading slowly through Queens, turning toward Long Island. A long drive out to where no people would be around to interfere.

As the apprehension rose up with him, he heard his own voice in the air -- “ _Reese?_ ” -- subdued, timorous, even a little lost, as if he was raising a question he didn’t really want to know the answer to but was compelled to ask anyway. “ _Where’s Doctor Tillman?_ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Couldn't resist a slight dig at a fandom that considers "Harold and John both die together" to be the superior happy ending, compared to one of them remaining to live out his days.
> 
> It's not that I can't enjoy fics that use this trope -- and I certainly don't appreciate the way that the final season got fumbled in canon. And there's undeniable poetry in bookending the series with their shared deaths. But I'm fairly confident in stating that **neither one of them** would consider that solution to be optimal.

**Author's Note:**

> Still struggling with a bit of writer's block, but so far this seems to be progressing well ^_^
> 
> Have changed the fic to a series, to make the chapters less crazy. See note at beginning of fic for more details.


End file.
